Recent corporate education reform policies have replaced relatively informal systems of principal observations that had been familiar to many teachers for much of their professional careers with high-stakes teacher evaluation (HSTE) systems that now determine who is allowed to remain in the profession and who gets terminated. Many education…

Districts nationwide have increased the frequency of teacher evaluations. Yet, we know little about the role of evaluator feedback for teacher improvement. Using unique classroom observation-level data, we use evaluator ratings and teacher self-assessments of teacher performance to rigorously examine (positive and negative) feedback valence from…

In this multiple case study, we apply sense-making theory to examine and compare how middle school special and general educators perceive and respond to teacher evaluation reform, including formal classroom observations, informal walk-throughs, and student growth measures. Our findings reveal that special educators experience conflict between the…

This research examines how public school principals in eight U.S. states perceive their teacher evaluation systems, which are based on Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching (FfT). States were selected to represent high, middle, and low scorers in the annual "Education Week" "Quality Counts" report (Education Week, 2016).…

In 2018, The RAND Corporation and the American Institutes for Research (AIR) published an evaluation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching (IP) initiative, which was designed to improve achievement among low-income minority (LIM) students. The initiative provided support for several reforms that…

This longitudinal study examined the professional perceptions of educational leaders as to the fairness and impact of teacher evaluation and compensation reforms under Race to the Top. The study surveyed graduate students in education and educational leadership programs to assess changes in their perceptions from prior to RTTT implementation…

States are in various stages of reforming how they evaluate their educators, all striving for a new system that can assess a range of abilities and practices over long periods of time and capture the full nature of an educator's performance. The strongest systems look at teaching in a more comprehensive way than evaluations have done in the past,…